


Backwards, in sympathy for the sundew

by misslonelyhearts



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-02-11
Updated: 2014-02-11
Packaged: 2018-01-12 00:18:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1179651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misslonelyhearts/pseuds/misslonelyhearts





	1. v. first kiss

  
  
The dragon’s bone-rattling roar shook snow from the shoulders of every rock, four faces turned to watch the wheeling shape as it blocked the winter sun, and Cassandra battled herself for possibly the last time.  
  
“Don’t do what you’re going to do.” She followed the Inquisitor to the edge of the mountain precipice where the wind hurled a thousand daggers of ice against their faces.  It howled, and Cassandra felt much the same, shouting to be heard. “We have come too far to lose you!”  
  
The Inquisitor turned and, possibly for the last time, they squared against one another.  
  
“Me? Ha!” she said, leaning close with an arm around Cassandra’s shoulder. “And what difference should the road behind make?”    
  
“To us, to me,” replied Cassandra, “all the difference in the world.”  
  
With a shrug the Inquisitor scanned the whirling, white sky, pointing out the approaching dragon, a rumble of fire already gathering in its throat.  
  
“A world that will end if I don’t-”  
  
Cassandra kissed her, hard.  Snowblind and frantic, she hauled the Inquisitor’s tall body against her own.  She poured into the press of their lips all the fractured fear, all the stupidity of the age itself and the fragility of peace, and got on with the business of loving.  Even too late, even down to the race of dragons who’d made both a hero and a coward of her more than once, Cassandra could have one more victory.   
  
The Inquisitor released her mouth slowly, and with a small sigh for the loss.  The wind snatched up whatever whispered word should have fallen to Cassandra.  It wasn’t enough.  The top of the world was too low for this.  They glanced back to find two shocked faces, Varric and Vivienne having abandoned their search for the dragon to gape at the clumsy romance before them, like statues agog, carved in ice on the mountainside.   
  
Cassandra shook her head, a screaming chorus of NO behind all the wind. The Inquisitor grinned madly, stampeded toward the thorny-limbed dragon as it swung close to the cliffside, and was gone.


	2. iv. first blood

  
  
“If we leave them here-” Varric started.    
  
But she’d have none of it this time.  Cassandra watched the Inquisitor muzzle him with a volcanic expression.  She garnered her most imperious tone, her most alarming posture, and carried it over to the gathered villagers.  
  
To the farmer who’d challenged her, a man with only his father’s old sword to protect his father’s father’s land, the Inquisitor said, “You like your village, do you not? You like this blade, too?”    
  
Cassandra stiffened as the man swallowed the last of his arguments and nodded up at the Inquisitor.  She gripped his sword, her huge hand all but crushing his, and lifted it.   
  
“Then act like it.  Keep it in hand or lose the hand.”   
  
With that, they mounted up and left, a cloud of hoof-beaten dust obscuring the small contingent of farm folk from Cassandra’s backward glance.   
  
And it was mostly dust they found upon returning some hours later;  Dust and blood, and eerie quiet except for the bleating of terrified goats, still penned in while their masters lay in pieces.  
  
Cassandra dismounted in the village square.  The Inquisitor kept her seat, and her tongue.  
  
Varric’s face went blotchy crimson as he shuffled from body to body, searching for something Cassandra couldn’t see.  When he found it, he yanked the sword out from under the farmer’s corpse and rounded on the Inquisitor.  He looked so odd, a horror-stricken child brandishing a blade half as big as he.  Varric’s voice split like cordwood when he yelled, “It’s going to be difficult to win hearts and minds when they’re splattered over half the countryside!”  
  
He threw the sword at her.  It thwanged harmlessly on the cobblestones and slid into the grass. All the string went out of him after that and, lacking the charm to put her off, he let Cassandra help him back onto his pony.  She found his silence more chilling than the buzzing of flies in the square.  
  
The farmer’s sword remained with them on the journey back to the Keep.  Indeed, it hardly left the Inquisitor’s grip, and she denied the quartermaster his request to clean and sharpen it.  Though they had more orders for the day, Cassandra could not budge the Inquisitor from her sequestered spot on the Keep’s upper balcony.  
  
Stripped to the waist, and bare but for her breastband and whatever long-healed scars she’d come with, the Inquisitor knelt like that for hours, breathing in and out, until the day was consumed, the sun set, and the balcony dark.  Cassandra seethed for the indulgence of it.  She longed for the pain of it, too.  For a time she stood by in the open air, tongue bitten and heart broken, and after glowflies began to bounce lazily in the valley below, she finally spoke.  
  
“Don’t mistake your grief for honor, Inquisitor.”  Cassandra moved across the balcony, disturbing the spill of moonlight over the other woman’s body.  She gestured at the hills. “They will not.”  
  
Minutes hummed by.  The Inquisitor gazed evenly at the nighttime countryside, and her voice matched it for depth and loss.  
  
“My mistake was forgetting,” she said, “how little life, my life, means to me.  And for others, their own grows more precious.”  
  
“We forget at our peril,” said Cassandra.  The Inquisitor looked up at her.  
  
She gave Cassandra a haunted sort of smile, a crack in a sheet of ice, and picked up the sword that lay at her knees. “I expect all lessons in doom must be like that.”  
  
Slowly, she drew the long, blood-sticky edge of the blade under her braid and sheared it off.  The hank of white hair thumped to the floor with its raw end coated red.   
  
Cassandra found it nailed to Varric’s door the next morning.


	3. iii. first night

  
  
Vivienne slept silent as a tomb. Dorian shifted restlessly. Varric didn’t sleep, yet pretended to.  Sera snored. And Cassandra kept watch over the Inquisition’s inaugural camp because sleep had so rarely been a friend that, among a growing list of similar quarry, she’d stopped seeking it.    
  
“My apologies.”  
  
At the wild and bushy edge of camp, the Inquisitor stood as a horned sister to the sentinel statuary that’d been abandoned, presumably by elves, in every corner of the forest.  Only, she smiled a lot, and that set her leagues apart.  Her voice, her long legs circling through dead leaves hadn’t startled Cassandra, but then that was the blessing of hypervigilance.  
  
“For what?” said Cassandra.  
  
“An assumption.”  She took a seat on her bedroll.  “Your name is too similar to a flower that grows in the Seheron jungle.  Kasaanda.”  
  
“That merits no apology.”    
  
Holding her hands out to the fire, the Inquisitor gave a small murmur of pleasure and then rubbed her palms together.   
  
“For some reason I’d assumed you were named for it, seems silly now,” she said. “You’re nothing like it.”  
  
“No, I have never been much of a flower.”  Cassandra looked away toward the ruptured hills. They wouldn’t remember, any better than she, the last time there’d been any softness to it all.   
  
With a snort and a dismissive shake of her head, the Inquisitor rummaged through her pack and produced a sheaf of parchment, a little travel-torn around the edges, and a stub of charcoal.  While Cassandra watched, she sketched a flower, roughly and with thick lines, the stick of charcoal leaving a slant of darker shadow from the light of the fire.  
  
It came out rather good, though of course Cassandra had never seen the thing and could conjure no real comparison.  Still, the simple beauty of the sketch surprised her.  
  
“It’s called sundew, a sneaky beast with an uncommon bloodlust. . .you know, for a plant,” said the Inquisitor, holding out the drawing to inspect it.  
  
“I see.”  
  
In the intervening silence, Cassandra itched to offer some excuse to retreat to a bed she wouldn’t sleep in.  The Inquisitor laid the parchment on the ground between them, weighing its curling corners with stones.  Satisfied, she drew her knees up under the circle of her arms and looked at Cassandra.  
  
“But, you don’t lure, you don’t ensnare.  You lack that guile,” she said.  It was so flatly spoken that Cassandra felt none of the angry heat associated with any attention paid her.  The Inquisitor shrugged, or shivered, and went on.  “In fact, given your considerable talents it’s strange how little you seem to enjoy killing.”  
  
“Strange to some.”  Cassandra nudged the small stones off the edge of the drawing and picked it up. There were finger smudges in shifting black.  “So, I am not a dangerous flower.  I confess I can’t tell if that puts you at ease or-”  
  
“I haven’t been at ease for a very long time, Seeker,” she said.  “Have you?”  
  
“No.”  It lacked the brilliance of any true revelation.  Cassandra studied the other woman’s hands, how she fiddled with the charcoal and didn’t seem to mind the soot.  “But you hide it better than all of us.”  
  
“A practiced fraud, and a necessity,” explained the Inquisitor.  She took an enormous breath and exhaled sharply, sending a confusion of embers skittering off the campfire toward the stars.  “Like eating more than your fill when there’s no promise of another meal, another day.”  
  
Off in the shadows, Sera made a barking sound in her sleep, muffled by the cover of pelts and cricket-song.  It was enough to make them smile, together.  Cassandra pressed the name over and over in her mind like grist: a march, oars in the water, whispered poison.   _Kasaanda_.  
  
“Perhaps any flower with that kind of adaptability must be forgiven its nature, its. . .appetites,” she said, and was struck by the quick reply.  
  
“Nature allows no ‘maybes’.”   
  
If the Inquisitor had eaten whole worlds for necessity Cassandra wouldn’t have been surprised.  Looking down at the sketch, she realized there was no indication of the flower’s color or its size, just black strokes over a pale landscape.  In its far off patch of jungle it could be trampled by oliphants or picked by an exploring child.   _Sundew_.  What a name for so vulnerable a killer.  
  
They nodded at one another.  The Inquisitor inspected her stick of charcoal for a moment and then tossed it back into the pack.  
  
“Goodnight, Cassandra.”  
  
“Goodnight, Inquisitor.”


	4. ii. first words

  
  
Vivienne smiled so much on the streets of Val Royeaux that Cassandra began to suspect her wine had been dosed.  But that was the Adaar effect, it seemed. The indomitable Madame De Fer was not immune, especially upon learning that the Inquisitor spoke her native language.  
  
“When I was last here the Game was blackened for the loss of a great craftsman.”  The Inquisitor looped her arm through Vivienne’s.  The tails of their long robes swished together, a parade of embellishment for Cassandra and Varric to step around.  “Did you know Monsieur Sédire?”  
  
“His work was known in many circles, even mine,” replied Vivienne.  “Did you ever wear a mask?”  
  
Cassandra watched the Inquisitor run a long-fingered hand over the curl of her horns.  
  
“My dear First Enchanter, I’m hardly ever without one.”  
  
More laughing.  Varric rolled his eyes.  Cassandra wondered how much he was catching, beyond the newly-exaggerated sway of their leader’s hips.  
  
She spoke Orlesian with a Northern accent, the size of her throat, her tongue, making every vowel a chasm and every consonant a ballista.  Cassandra briefly envisioned the kind of person who might have taught her, and Leliana’s face was both the limit of her imagination and its eternal spark.  
  
“Can we get on with this?”   
  
“Don’t let these chevaliers catch you sounding so eager, Seeker,” said the Inquisitor, dropping the local language like a discarded orange peel. “You’ll give us away.”  
  
“I believe the armor does that already,” replied Cassandra, and didn’t look down at her chest, annoyed at her flush of, what. . .envy?  She was a sore thumb behind the two women in their finery, the perpetual bannermaid, always Ser Obvious.  But it was the Inquisitor’s backward glance, a cold but comforting flash-quick wink, that saved Cassandra’s thoughts from darkening.  Steel was not the only substance tempered to toughness.  
  
They passed under the everlong shadow of the White Spire and were still, as far as Cassandra could tell, far from their target.


	5. i. first sight

  
  
The qunari emerged from her cell like smoke from a cave.  She filled the prison’s dank space and, rising, rising entirely to her height, stood before them with a smile.  Cassandra had never seen one of them smile.  Like everything else about her, the qunari’s mouth was large, poised with the promise of intimidation.  But unlike everything else, her mouth was also soft, and it stretched wide under a fading crimson paint the color of a courtesan’s blush.  Varric coughed. Cassandra swallowed.    
  
“I hope the price for my freedom wasn’t too dear,” said the qunari, with a voice like blackwood, “because the two of you look like a bard’s bad joke.”  Her jailors may as well have been furniture for all the regard she gave them.  As if to illustrate this, the two guards shrank against the dungeon wall with the authority of potted plants.  
  
“Oh, I’d say we got our money’s worth,” said Varric. “What do you think, Seeker?”  
  
Unbothered by their open appraisal, the qunari woman crossed her arms, which were long and thickly muscled, and dusted with coal-colored freckles.  Cassandra had often been accused of morose silence, brooding silence, bitter silence, but her loss of words before the qunari had little in common with those moments.  Instead of calculated quiet, she was simply awestruck by the sight of the woman, who seemed more imposing the longer they stood there.  Between her two horns there hung a cascade of hair, twisting down, soft white and so . . .long.   
  
Beneath the qunari’s increasingly amused gaze, and lacking a clever opening gambit, Cassandra fished through the depths of her training and came up short.  She cleared her throat and squared her jaw, and as soon as she spoke she felt Varric’s eyes all but twinkling beside her.  
  
“Tell me everything you know about the Inquisition.”

 


End file.
